Reveling in the Darkness
Review of Ricky Ray’s Quiet, Grit, Glory (Broken Sleep Books, 2020)
By Stephanie Chan
Would you believe me if I told you that I found it incredibly difficult to write this review? Every time I finished reading Ricky Ray’s chapbook, Quiet, Grit and Glory, every time I came back to it, all I wanted to do was to hold my dog, take her outside for a walk, leaving my phone at home, put my nose to the earth, and roll in the grass with her, just to see what I might find.
Quiet, Grit, Glory is the poet Ricky Ray’s second publication, following his full-length collection Fealty (Diode Books, 2019). The collection’s mature and certain voice reflects Ray’s 20 or so years of experience in writing poetry. It contains some of the best poems I have ever read about a poet’s relationship with their dog. It’s funny because one of the first pieces of advice I received when I started writing was “never write about your pets”: it’s way too easy to get self-indulgent and sentimental when doing so. But Quiet, Grit, Glory does precisely that, showing that brilliant poems about pets are still out there, ready to be written.
The book’s epigraph, a quote from poet, farmer, and environmental activist Wendell Berry is almost too perfect a quote to start the book with—
To care for what we know
requires care for what we don’t,
the world’s lives dark in the soil,
dark in the dark.
At its core, Quiet, Grit, Glory is a collection about what it means to care for the world, its people, the living things around you, and yourself. It is also about darkness: the limits of care and understanding, how to keep living amidst trauma and pain.
A slim chapbook of just over 40 pages, it opens with “Pain: 8 on a Scale of 10.” Ray describes briefly but vividly the experience of living with chronic pain: “Some nights, the sleeve of me seizes.” He captures the wishful dissociation and banal horror of chronic pain, how he wishes to “slip between two ticks of the pulse, leaving/ all the arguments of the flesh to cancel one another out.” Pain hovers in the foreground and the background of Ray’s life, and many of his poems are colored by the desire to keep on living alongside it.
This desire is exemplified in the exquisite “Resolution,” where Ray writes, “My body keeps auditioning to play the part of a poem,” and then tells it, “Listen, body,/ I’m not very good at this. But it’s snowing. / And the mind is beautiful when she is quiet.” This poem is one of the gentler conversations with a chronically ill body, as Ray compares caring for his body to “believing in magic, that old byproduct of song.” While there is pain, Ray remains intent on celebrating small, glorious moments as they come.
Chronic illness also informs Ray’s relationship with his dog, a chocolate Labrador-Setter mix named Addie. Addie, whose portrait appears at the beginning of the book, is not just a pet but a comforter and teacher to Ray—of gratitude for the world, of the possibilities of living in awe instead of pain. Many of the poems in Quiet, Grit, Glory feature Ray and Addie’s close relationship, and they hit especially hard for me as a reader: I live with a close family member with a degenerative condition, and our family life often cycles between caregiving and crisis. In the midst of all this, and especially during the repeated lockdowns, we have found that our dog and cats have been our biggest source of joy, relief, and strength.
Ray’s poems reflect the long lineage of interdependence and coevolution between humans and canines. In “Varieties of Service,” one of the opening poems, Ray says he is “no more her master than I am the master of myself.” He dissolves the accepted hierarchy between a pet and its owner, and instead presents his and Addie’s lives as “two countries with their own customs but no clearly defined border.” In doing so, he broadens his ability to empathize and relate to Addie’s actions. When Ray sees Addie rolling in some kind of animal dung filled with fish scales, as he does in “Walk with Addie,” instead of reacting with horror, Ray sees a moment of learning and gratitude: “I felt fortunate to be taught by her. To witness the embodiment of an infatuation one dives into like a second skin.”
Attention to the natural world requires an awareness of mortality, a theme that recurs in Ray’s poems. Animal deaths are presented with a grotesque humor. In “Yourself in Headlights” a drunk driver plunges his hands into a raccoon he has hit with his car, while in “Charlie,” a shrew is killed and then buried ignominiously by a cat. Closer to home, Addie’s ageing is a source of anxiety, one that reminds Ray of his own mortality. In “Into the Dark,” he admits that “I rehearse her death in my mind too often./ I’m rehearsing my own death in hers.”
But my favorite exploration of mortality in this collection by far is a poem that is also ultimately about childlessness. In “The What of Us,” a poem of four sections, Ray engages with lineage and transforms it from a familial to an existential one:
this branch
of the family tree bears no leaf
in preparation for falling away.
Turning brittle. Breaking off.
And yet, how many sticks
have I thrown,
have my dog Addie mouthed
from the ground in love?
Ray writes poignantly of how love and legacy can take many forms, and how Death is only a small part of a much larger cycle, the whole of which we may not yet understand. In this poem, if even a dead tree branch can provide joy for a man and his dog, what possibilities for love and joy lie in each of us?
And why shouldn’t we learn from living things and the natural world, seeing as we are part of them? The spine of this collection lies in its unsentimental, fearless declarations, in Ray’s unwavering belief in our own interconnectedness with the natural world: how we are and will always be a part of it, not separate from it nor owners of it. For example, how Ray writes, “We say upon as if/ the Earth and men were not each other” (“Once in Twelve Years I Go to Church”), or how “nothing I ever touched belonged to me more than I to it” (“Petty Theft”), or how he is reminded continually that “These are the times/ when I hear the Earth singing us into existence” (“Continuity in the Park”). It is through these lines that I realized that “glory” in the chapbook’s title is not about victory, but rather about reveling in how glorious the world around us can be. It is this perspective that ties all the poems together, adding meaning and cohesion to every piece.
Ray is far from the first poet to write about interconnectedness. In fact, in a lesser poet’s hands, these observations could sound preachy or downright cheesy. But Ricky Ray’s gift is how he grounds his epiphanies in specificity, his own pain and exuberance, his own terror and wonder. Quiet, Grit, Glory is an exaltation, a joyous roar, a whimper of fear, and a whisper all at once. It is a celebration of life at its more horrific and its most wondrous—its animals, its plants, its deaths, its cycles. It is an invitation to scream, stop, sniff the ground and smell the sacred all around us.
A former Singapore and UK national slam champion, Stephanie Chan’s first poetry collection Roadkill for Beginners explores place-making, found family, growing up, and epic times in abandoned buildings and around bonfires. They are the founder of a monthly poetry open-mic night in Singapore called Spoke & Bird and a co-editor of EXHALE: An Anthology of Queer Singapore Voices (Math Paper Press). Their writing has appeared in Esquire Magazine, QLRS, Corvid Queen, and Rabbit Poetry, among others. You can find them at @stephdogfoot on Twitter and Instagram
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